The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

Author:Jenny Colgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The days began to take on a pattern. After Nina had finished work, she would cash out, then start planning what she was going to leave for Marek on their tree. It had developed into a full-blown flirtation. Some days she wanted to be funny, some days more serious. Some days she just wrote to him what was on her mind, and he’d write back. She realized that she hadn’t written a letter for years and years, actually sat down and committed her thoughts to paper rather than pinging them off in an e-mail. She wrote more slowly, felt more deeply.

Always she remembered Marek’s big puppy-dog eyes, his sweet concern for her. He wrote to her about things he missed from home, about funny things he’d seen through people’s back windows. His English was broken and his spelling could be hit and miss, but he had a lovely, often curious way of expressing himself, and she understood him perfectly.

No matter how much Surinder told her it wasn’t real, that she was living through a fantasy, she couldn’t help it. For even with Surinder there, and the new people she met every day at the van, she still felt rather lonely, brand new, alone up here in this little green corner at the tip of the world. Daydreaming about Marek was something to keep her warm, a lovely idea she kept in her heart all day long, thinking of things he would like, what would make him laugh, what would make a pretty parcel in a bag. One night it was a little sculpture of a bear she found for pennies in a market; another time a book of woodcut art nobody wanted; a miniature of whiskey she’d been handed as part of a promotion in one of the larger towns; some deep-scented heather. And he would drop off bags of sweets from his home country; a carved pencil she thought he might have made himself; some new handmade notepaper, which she treasured.

And then, one day, as she was wondering to herself, wandering down the lane by the meadow, how on earth it could possibly still be light at ten thirty in the evening, she opened the latest note in his familiar dark hand, written as if the pen was too small for his large paw.

Saturday, it said simply. No sleeper.

Her heart began to beat faster immediately. What had been delicate, a little courtship played out in an unusual way, had suddenly changed into something far more real.

Every night, she’d gone to bed thinking about Marek, about his gentle, strange foreign ways, his unflappability. And this unexpected relationship that had somehow sprung up between them. She knew that the railway tree, ailing as it was, was just as important to him as it was to her. His notes, filled with poetry and the occasional snatches of his own language, felt to her deeply rich and romantic, and she had saved them, every one.

Nights when he was not working or there was nothing on the tree were wholly disappointing.

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